


The Pelagic Affair

by Orockthro



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Age of Sail, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Napoleonic Wars, Gen, Selkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-27 07:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21114884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: “Oh, despite appearances, the Captain doesn’t stand on principle for very long. We’re hardly out of port yet, you see. Once we shove off a bit deeper into the water, you’ll understand more. Captain’s only ever comfortable on the open sea.”It’s clear that Kuryakin, however adept as a captain he may be, is not the sort of companionable captain Napoleon is used to sailing with.“I am beginning to see that, yes. Ah, tell me, Mr. Slate, what do you think of her?”Slate starts and nearly chokes on his pudding, a feat Napoleon had hitherto thought impossible. “Pardon?”“The ship, of course. If I’m to spend the next month or more aboard her, I feel I ought to know what sort of ship she is."(Or, Napoleon Solo considers himself both an intelligent man as well as an intelligence man, and finds himself sailing on an unusual ship with an even more unusual crew during the Napoleonic Wars. )





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has been a WIP in my drafts folder for far too long. <3 Please enjoy.

Napoleon looks down at his luggage - three carefully bundled crates of fine silk, two of muslin, and his own sea chest with his personal effects - and then up at his apparent berth blocking out the horizon. Nestled in the inlet is a small frigate, three masted and low in the water. Certainly, he has traveled in far larger; it is a wonder it could be classed as a frigate at all, let alone a battle-ready vessel. But no, looking even from here and without a glass he can see she must be a 24-gun ship; small as she is, there is no doubt she bites.

He glances down at his luggage one last time as it is loaded into the skiff that will row him out to the ship, and he wonders that he didn’t invest more thoroughly in waterproof skins for his more... important documents. Surely he could have weaseled it out of the Admiralty, even if they are uncommon tight-fisted of late. He winces as his personal sea chest, the more important by far, thuds into the bottom of the boat.

“All aboard, sir,” says a spry youth who looks somehow like a boy and an old man all at once, his face already half beaten-in by the sun, and Napoleon forces himself to clap on to the side of the boat and leave his beloved land behind in one moderately graceful leap. 

As the skiff laboriously maneuvers towards the ship that will be his home for the coming months, Napoleon recalls the circumstances that brought him to this point. Namely, his service to the Navy despite his ill-suited nature for the sea, and the documents wrapped twice in waterproof skins in the chest at the bottom of the row boat. Documents that must, under any circumstances, make their way to the Americas unmolested. His position on the voyage is under the guise of a merchantman transporting rare and valuable silks who couldn’t wait for the next packet ship, and although the silks are in fact rare and valuable, the documents are far more so. When the Admiralty, Mr. Waverly in particular-- his connection on the intelligence side of things and man whom he respects-- chose this vessel for him to make his very important journey, it sent the trusted clerk tittering into his hands; Napoleon is quickly understanding why.

“Tell me, is the ship very wet?”

“Oh, undoubtedly. One of the wettest. The orlop is soaked through even on a calm day, and there’s not a beam aboard that isn’t thick with mold. Not the Captain’s quarters, though, and you’ll be berthing with the Captain, the ship being so small as it is. The carpenter is putting up a bulkhead as we speak. Keep that dry as a cork, we do. Captain’s orders.”

“Ah,” Napoleon says, filled with a half relief. At least his particular chest will be safe, though the silks might come to ruin. 

“Don’t you worry, sir,” the sun-baked boy says, and Napoleon makes a note to ask the Captain for the boy’s name and position when he finally boards; he’s precocious enough to be useful. “We might be small, but we take care of our own.” There’s a layer to the lad’s meaning that, had Napoleon not been a tried and true member of the Admiralty’s intelligence services, he might have missed. But as it was, he filed it away to ruminate on later and concentrated on not imagining the coming months, trapped in a claustrophobic box of wood with two hundred men and not a single woman to make the passage any sweeter. 

He’s brought aboard without any grace, trundled up in a bosun’s chair and hoisted over the side of the ship with hands pulling him this way and that. Once he rights himself and sees that his belongings are following him, he brushes at his coat and breeches out of habit, turns, and finds himself nose to hairline with a man in a tall hat and a short everything else.

“Good day, sir,” Napoleon says, and then, blankly, sees the epaulettes adorning the man’s shoulder that indicate this is not a growth-stunted lieutenant, but the captain himself. “Ah...”

“Good day, Mr. Solo. I am Captain Kuryakin. Once your things have been stowed we will make sail; you very nearly made us miss our tide.” The words are said coldly, and with an inflection of voice that is not native to the parts of England that Napoleon is more familiar with, however it is exceptionally close. 

Captain Kuryakin dismisses him completely after than, entrusting his entry into the ship to one of the midshipmen, a young, not quite so sunburnt boy by the name of Bartley, and disappears towards the aft of the ship to oversee some essential process of their departure. 

Napoleon is shepherded to a dark, damp, closet-like room he is told is, “the cabin, sir, if you please, freshly made up for you,” and deposited there with his sea chest. The cabin is partially split down the middle, allowing for a semblance of privacy between what Napoleon interpreted to be his side of the room, and then the Captain’s. Despite Napoleon having only come aboard, and being simply a traveler having only one sea chest of belongings, their spaces look nearly the same; utterly bare and devoid of personality.

He sits on his sea chest, and as soon as he does so, feels the unmistakable heave of the ship as it, presumably, gathers wind under its freshly laid sails and begins to make way. 

“If you need anything, sir, just call out,” says Bartley, and Napoleon nods to dismiss him. 

He sits there in silence for nearly an hour, possibly two-- he hasn’t a pocket watch with him, having sold it before he left-- recalling that it was his own decision to approach the Admiralty with the desire to be an intelligence agent, professing that his fluency in French, due to his mother’s origins, would be of at least some benefit. As he sits in silence, alone for all the sounds of life above him-- running feet and shouts of direction; even the sea sounds busy. He reminds himself, too, that this potentially interminable boredom is for the greater, and in fact essential, cause of disrupting Bonaparte's efforts in America. He has never despised his own name so much as when war first broke out. 

“The Captain invites you to dinner, sir,” Barkley says, standing in the cabin and looking about, as if he expected to find something wildly changed upon his return to Napoleon. “He asks me remind you that an invitation to a Navy dinner--”

“Ah, yes, this is not my first time at sea. I know just how serious a Captain’s dinner is.”

This particular dinner, with Captain Kuryakin sat at the head of the table in the traditional manner, is exceptionally serious: it’s a somber affair, punctuated by the clatter of silver and the obligatory passing of the wine. The first lieutenant, a man with an oily face and a jovial complexion, Slate, does his best to lift spirits as well as pass them back and forth, but he’s greatly hindered by the conventions of the naval dinner, which states that no one shall speak unless spoken to by the Captain first.

“So you are a merchantman,” says the Captain. His voice is pleasant, almost sweet, with the addition of wine and his strange manner of speaking. 

“I specialize in fine silks, and mine are the best that the continent has to offer, by far. An American has written to purchase a great deal of--”

Although Kuryakin is not so rude as to cut him off, and in fact there is no apparent motion or even change in his facial expression, Napoleon is left with the fast impression that if he wants to have a peaceful voyage for the next several months, he had best close his mouth, and so he does so. 

“Yes. Quite right. A merchantman,” he finishes up, displeased with himself for misjudging both his situation and his use of words. 

The remainder of the dinner passes in uncomfortable silence until, somewhat a relief, Kuryakin is called away and it is only himself and Slate at the table. Slate, quite well into the Captain’s wine, smiles broadly at him.

“Mr. Solo, I am so glad to have you aboard. It is a long journey, and there are precious few gentleman to share the wardroom with.”

“I can see that. Does the captain not usually invite more to his table?”

Slate winks, a thoroughly unexpected and even more thoroughly pleasant one. “I’m afraid, other than the mids, there aren’t many gentleman to invite. It’s a small ship, see, and most are hands here.” 

What he sees is that It’s amazing how quickly a man can find himself without any intimacy, the carnal sort or even the more basic and appropriate type, and Napoleon, in part due to his choice of career, has found himself quite without friends. Although Slate is clearly not the sort of man to whom he can entrust his confidence, the idea of having a man around with whom he can smile and joke is shockingly appreciated. It’s clear that Kuryakin, however adept as a captain he may be, is not the sort of companionable captain he is used to sailing with.

“I am beginning to see that, yes. Ah, tell me, Mr. Slate, what do you think of her?”

Slate starts and nearly chokes on his pudding, a feat Napoleon had hitherto thought impossible. “Pardon?”

“The ship, of course. If I’m to spend the next month or more aboard her, I feel I ought to know what sort of ship she is. I’ve had the pleasure of sailing in several Indiamen, and I must say, they are a great deal larger, and a great deal dryer, although one of the ship’s boys indicated the cabin where I’ll be staying is kept reasonably free of damp.”

“That’s exactly right. I know you’ve been there, but I can’t imagine you’ve had time to settle in. If you’d like, I can show you back there now.”

Napoleon looks about their half abandoned table. He and Slate had dug into the pudding without the Captain when it was delivered, and a heap of it sits on the silver plate at his place-setting. “It would be appropriate?”

“Oh, despite appearances, the Captain doesn’t stand on principle for very long. We’re hardly out of port yet, you see. Once we shove off a bit deeper into the water, you’ll understand more. Captain’s only ever comfortable on the open sea.”

In a strange way, Napoleon can understand that. He is only ever comfortable off it, and it makes sense that sea captains are upside down in most logical fashions. 

Slate leads him back to his berth, but first out into the open sea air of the deck. The wind is gentle but ever-present, and the sails robustly full of it. Behind them the port of Mahon is a spec, diminished into nothing more than a dot on the horizon to match its dot on the map. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Captain Kuryakin is pacing the  fo'c'sle and overseeing the taking in of lines and rigging and other ship related activities Napoleon is largely unfamiliar with. He raises his head when he sees his lieutenant and Solo appear above decks, and then proceeds to ignore them completely. Despite the pleasantness of the sea, swells rise up and cover the deck in a fine mist, a mist that the hands let wash over them, but that the captain guards himself against with a full boatcloak, hood, and hat even with the heat of the Mediterranean beating down from above.. 

“You’ve sailed before, you said?”

Napoleon looks back at Slate. “Several journeys for my business. Never across to America, although my father is an American. My mother was Spanish, before the war, of course.” He says it partially to gauge Slate’s reaction, but the hint of wrong birth is either too well disguised to have an impact, or Slate truly has not a care in the world about it. 

“We’ve all got blood in us from here and there,” Slate says, placidly and with so little a hint at anything that Napoleon’s intelligence-minded soul can’t help but roll it over and over in his head as they walk the ship from end to end, with Slate showing off the canons, the rigging, and the masts. 

He returns to his hammock, only to find the Captain already there, standing still as a statue on his side of the cabin. 

“Good evening, Captain Kuryakin.”

“Mr. Solo.”

True to the crew’s word, the little room, though dark and claustrophobic with two grown men inside, is as dry as a cork. Napoleon tries to take this to heart as he goes about preparing for bed. His hammock has been slung for him, and he glares at its limp, swinging bulk. This is one of his least favorite parts of sea travel; his left-behind feather bed was a treasured possession he was loath to sell.

As he removes his waistcoat and hat, he turns to see the Captain shrugging off his boatcloak, hard weather cap, and tall leather boots. Underneath it all he is a small man. Slender, but with the obvious lean look of a man whose body is bone and corded muscle; the port and pudding belly he’s seen on other captains does not threatens this body. 

“I hope my presence hasn’t put you too out of sorts,” he says, when the silence of anything but the sound of the ship builds to an uncomfortable level. 

Kuryakin throws him a glance before trundling himself into his hammock with surprising grace, clothes not shifted a stitch. “It is not the first time I have traveled with guests aboard my ship, Mr. Solo. Your importance was... stressed to me.”

In the process of pulling on his nightshirt, Napoleon starts. “Ah? I’m surprised a silk merchant rates so high to the Admiralty.” 

“Please, Mr. Solo, do not suppose I am a simpleton. Goodnight.”

And then Kuryakin, seemingly between one breath and another, begins to snore, effortlessly falling into a sleep that does not come to Napoleon until four bells have struck above decks. 


	2. Chapter 2

Days pass with little difference between them beyond the weather. Every morning a tall slender midshipman named Dancer, with a long and pretty face that has clearly not been ruined by either sea or puberty yet, comes to help the Captain dress, and ushers Napoleon out to have coffee with Slate while he does so.

Slate, over a steaming cup, says, “we’re so short handed, some of the lads act as servants. Honestly, we prefer it that way. Keeps things simple. We like the ship we have and the company on it. Strangers upset that balance.” He says it lightly, but there’s a hardness there Napoleon cannot ignore wisely. 

In the first week aboard it is never clearer to Napoleon that he is a stranger. It’s truly only Slate who takes time to speak with him; the handful of other officers are hardly ever seen, working watches late into the night and so asleep during dinner, and when they do interact, it is only a nod and a ‘how do you do.’ 

For his purposes, the former situation is safer in regards to his position as an intelligence agent. But Napoleon is a social creature, and the thought of isolating himself completely for the coming months depresses him even more than the coffee he and Slate drink, which is little more than brown water served too hot to mask the taste with scald.

“What are you looking at, sir?” It’s Dancer, bundled up in oilskins against the spray, peering at whatever Napoleon might be looking at off the starboard side.

“I’m trying to see if there are any whales. I’ve been told I must look to see whales if I have the chance.” There is precious little else to do aboard, and so he occupies himself studying both the crew and the glimpses of life he sees in the sea. He keeps a journal, twice encrypted in code, but beyond that, he has no job aboard, no friends with the exception of Slate, who must himself work, and no hobby he can distract himself with. The only thing left is to observe.

Dancer squints at him rather than the ocean.

“There are no whales for miles and miles, but when there are, we’ll call for you, so you don’t miss them. They are beautiful beings, and how they sing.”

Napoleon stares at the boy. “Thank you, that is most kind.”

Dancer shrugs; already the sun is turning his skin brown and his hair light. “It’s no bother. It’s not as if... That is to say, they’re not difficult to point out.”

Mostly what Napoleon observes as the days pass, is not sea life, for he has no eye for it, nor birds, for he finds them appalling creatures who do nothing but cackle and defecate, but the men of the ship. 

Slate, for all his easy conversation, gives very little away, and Dancer, after Slate gives him a quiet word, gives away even less, hardly looking at him every morning when he pushes him out to dress the Captain in peace. 

The Captain is the largest mystery of them all. He shares a berth with the man, and yet has only ever shared perhaps a single page, writ large, of words with Napoleon, and most of those constituting, ‘good day to you sir,’ and, ‘a drink with you, Captain,’ at the dinner table. The table which the Captain has only hosted twice since the waters ran deep.

“Told you, the Captain doesn’t stand on much Navel ceremony out here in the waters,” Slate says over their habitual morning coffee. Despite himself, Napoleon is growing accustomed to the taste. “No reason for it, peacocking about. Only reason Captain did at’all was since you were here. Captain didn’t want to make us look bad.” There’s an odd pressure in Slate’s words, and he sets down his coffee and apologizes straight away. “Beg pardon, the barometer’s been dropping like a stone and we’re all feeling it. Wear your oilskins today if you go up.”

Even as he says it, the sea begins to change under them. He returns to his half of the cabin and begins to write in his journal, and as he does so, the swells and lurches rise and send Napoleon’s pen skittering across the floor. Only a deft leap saves his entire inkwell from toppling over. Had he been prone to seasickness, this would surely have been the end of him. He puts his things away carefully, rises, and walks to the ladder leading up with both hands outstretched to steady himself.

He’s nearly drowned upon climbing the hatchway, as a swell rises over the side and drenches him to his stockings, oilskins be damned. 

As soon as he is above, he’s immediately turned about by strong hands. “Below, sir, now; we’ll never find you if you go overboard in this.” It’s the bosun’s mate who says it, and who leads him back down again and deposits him, soaking and leaving an enormous puddle expanding across the floor. The sea is too rough to do anything other than strip his oilskins and leave them crumpled on the back of an elbow chair, and to crawl into his hammock and pray they do not all drown.

He does not sleep, but he also does not wake, and he persists in a long period of strange half-awareness while the ship creaks and shudders and fights to stay afloat. All the while he is sure that he will have failed his mission, that his documents will never make it to America, and that Boneparte, the devil, will succeed in gaining a foothold there.

He swings in time with the roiling ocean, and prays, and is entirely shocked when he opens his eyes to see Dancer in front of him, still in his oilskins and staring, appalled.

“Sir!”

“Oh. Dancer. We are alive. I’m very relieved.”

“Sir, you’ve gotten the cabin all wet!”

Napoleon struggles to sit up and swing his legs out of the hammock. His shoes are upside down and lord knows how soggy, and he is reluctant to put his feet down in the puddle that he has created. 

“So I have. I do apologize, but I’m afraid in a horrible storm like that there was nothing to be done. Were there any losses?” He looks around, and suddenly the absence of the Captain is obvious, and there is an odd pang in his gut. “The Captain...”

“The Captain is above, no losses, but the damp... the Captain can never sleep in this. Not--” the boy cuts off, and Napoleon looks him over carefully. He must be in shock. He’s old enough to have sailed before, but perhaps this is the worst storm he’s encountered.

The ship’s motion is still wrenching, but it is not as bad as before, and Napoleon, with Dancer’s help, collects himself in dry boots and shrugs on his damp oilskin, and rises in hunt of coffee. Halfway there he sees a splash of grim, gray light from above and hears a strange noise; almost a keening, perhaps from a whale. 

He climbs above and goes to the stern, holding tight to the taffrail as he does so. The sea is black and the sky a horrible, angry gray, shot with red from the sunrise. It’s difficult to even find the horizon, for the swells that come up from behind the ship are massive and dark and send everything lurching forwards and back, and it’s only with white knuckles that Napoleon feels secure squinting out into the dark, looking.

“What are you doing! Go below, at once!” 

He realizes too late that the swells are no smaller than before, but that the ship has come to a better position to weather them, taking them head on rather than from the side, and with all but two small sails rolled and held away. The storm, or perhaps monsoon, is not calmed at all and the danger is changed, not gone.

It is at that realization, with Captain Kuryakin advancing towards him, a small figure with great strides cutting through the rain, that a swell catches the ship from the side, sweeps Napoleon’s feet from under him, and carries him overboard.

Napoleon is aware of little as he is carried over the side of the ship. He hits the water face first, and gasps a lungful of tepid, mediterranean-warm seawater upon impact, stunning him further. All around him is black, and he has little notion of which way is further into the abyss, and which might lead him to salvation, and should he even be able to puzzle it out, he is too insensible to swim, let alone make it to the ship again.

What he contemplates while drowning are not these things, but instead, somewhat unexpectedly, that he is indignant that he did not even get a final cup of coffee before he died. It seems inhuman that a man might be swept into the ocean, lost forever, his mission unfinished and his body never recovered, that he would not get a final cup of coffee.

As he has this thought and the blackness of the water is encroached upon by the blackness of his darkening vision, something thick and strong catches him about the middle and tugs him up, violently, until he crashes to the surface. That same force crushes against him until he is forced to draw breath, and his lungs heave out the vast quantity of the ocean he has swallowed. 

He does not think of anything but breathing for a time after that, gives little thought to whomever has leapt to his own death in order to save him, because for all that Napoleon is no longer under the surface of the water, he is not yet safe. The storm is cruel and harsh, and every swell threatens to sweep him back under it and he knows without question that were he to go under again, he would never make it back up alive. He floats as best he can and flits in and out of a fugue state, aware that time is passing, but not how much, and that the sea is calming, but he does not have the strength to look up and see if the ship is in sight or if day has broken.

He persists like this until suddenly the luke-warm sea changes under him, and he realizes that what he feels holding his body up is not the ocean, but sand.

He lays there, the ocean having at some point during all of this changed from wild seas to calm ones, and the waves push at him gently until he has the strength to get his arms under him, and can pull himself weakly back until his entire body is free from the sea.

Napoleon turns to his side, coughs up what feels like several buckets of saltwater, and comes face to face with a seal.

It is calmly looking at him, brown coat dark with wet, and eyes oddly intelligent, oddly blue, staring into his until he is compelled to look away. Napoleon knows, instinctively, that this is the creature that saved him. 

He rolls onto his back, looks at the sky and falls asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Napoleon wakes up staring at a beautiful woman with shoulder-length hair so blonde it’s nearly white, and whipcord-lean arms holding him in place. Most startling is the fact that she is utterly naked. He feels his face flush, and he looks away out of a sense of modesty he is unused to feeling in the presence of naked women.

“You are finally awake,” the woman says, somehow making the words convey her annoyance at the situation. She speaks with an odd cadence, and with a start Napoleon realizes it is the same strange set of speech patterns that Captain Kuryakin uses. In fact, this woman could be his twin. The same set of the jaw, the same squinting of the eyes, the same quirk of brow. 

Napoleon squints, pushes her arm away and sits up, rubbing his eyes free from sand and salt as he does so. He is thirstier than he has ever been in his life, and vaguely ill feeling. When he looks at her again, eyes blinking in the harsh sun, he sees not a feminine version of the Captain, but the Captain himself, his usually clubbed pigtail unbound, and two small but unquestionable breasts on his chest.

He coughs. “Captain.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kuryakin says, eyes rolling up to stare at a palm tree. 

“Please, Captain Kuryakin, do not suppose I am a simpleton,” he says, parroting back the infuriating man’s words from weeks before. “You are a woman and have hidden it. I’m actually very impressed. Dancer must know, and that’s why he chased me out every morning. But how you’ve kept everyone from the ship from knowing, I cannot conceive.”

Kuryakin laughs, flops back on the beach, unconcerned with her nakedness. “From the ship? Not a soul aboard does not know me for a woman. Not a soul, now that you know.”

They lay there, Napoleon shivering and fully clothed, and Kuryakin apparently comfortable as Eve to be mother naked and not feeling shock nor cold either. 

“Ah, none of this explains why you are without clothing, nor why you jumped in after me. It’s a miracle we were both not killed, and now your ship is god knows where. Not that I am unappreciative, mind.”

“I had not believed you to be stupid, however I am reconsidering this observation,” Kuryakin says, turning to her side and staring at him, just like the seal had been staring at him. 

Napoleon stares back for a long minute before saying, “No.”

“My womanhood is much simpler to hide, I assure you, but it, too, is not a secret from my ship.”

“You are a selkie.” The seal on the shore and Kuryakin and this woman are all the same creature. Two impossibilities hidden in a third. He tries to remember more of the sea and his plummet from the ship, but all he can recall is drowning, and the memory sends his throat seizing and he coughs repeatedly until it clears. 

Kuryakin blinks at him while he collects himself. “I am. And no, I will not do it for you to see.” 

Napoleon winces, for that had indeed been the next question on his lips. Instead he asks, “They all know, you say? Does Slate know?”

Kuryakin raises an eyebrow at him. “Of course. He would be an abysmal second in command if he did not.”

“And Dancer? The other mids?”

“Will this satisfy your annoying curiosity?”

“Possibly.”

“Yes, Dancer knows. How could she not?”

Napoleon’s jaw drops, and he thinks about the boy, whose voice is high and whose body slender, and finds he cannot think of any reason why it might not be true that the boy is in fact a girl, possibly a woman rather than a child. The same is true for Kuryakin, whose entire body, hidden under waistcoats and naval jackets, looks only different because he had not seen it before, and her face is unchanged from its male state; there has been no transformation at all, save the one from animal to human and back again. It is shocking, in hindsight, that he did not notice it at all, her womaness. 

“Oh, do not vex yourself,” Kuryakin says when he loses himself in thought. “I have succeeded in this game of play for far longer than you can imagine. A woman does not become a captain overnight.”

Napoleon considers himself both an intelligent man as well as an intelligence man, and readily concedes that he has not the slightest notion of the requirements of a woman captain, let alone a selkie captain, to maintain her secret natures. “I suppose we are stuck here until the ship finds us? Me, you would sail on without, but surely they will look for you?” 

“Hmm,” Kuryakin says, noncommittally. “Perhaps.” It is an evasion, and Napoleon prides himself on spotting it on the enigmatic figure for what it is. And then, after a moment’s pause where she sits up, brushes the drying sand from her naked skin, and stands, “You did not ask if the Admiralty knows.”

Napoleon’s jaw drops. “Surely they do not. They would never knowingly let a woman captain a ship, regardless of her skill. I cannot begin to argue that you’ve shown anything but exemplary leadership and seamanship, but the Admiralty, in my experience, cares little about that at all and everything for their customs and pomp.”

Kuryakin snorts. “They care little for why I am a good Captain, and less still for what fleshy parts I have, and a great deal in how to control me.”

Then she pauses, staring out at the sea for a moment, before continuing, her voice slower and deeper and more dangerous than before. “They have Dancer’s pelt.”

Napoleon, still half dazed and half drowned, considers this statement for a moment too long before he conjures up the face of the young midshipman and realizes what it means. “And the stories of pelts, they are true, then?”

Kuryakin scoffs. “I know not what stories you’ve been told.” And then, staring down at him exposed to the world she continues: “If our pelts are stolen from us, we cannot return to the sea. It is a terrible fate, to be trapped between worlds. Now that I have told you this, know that I will kill you before I let you tell it.”

Napoleon nods and arranges himself in a more comfortable sitting position, glad that his body cooperates with his wishes; it affords him at least a modicum of dignity, which he finds himself sorely needing. “You have my word.”

They spend the rest of the morning scouting the island, looking for sources of freshwater and finding a brook inland with an abundance of small fish that they eat raw. Kuryakin eats them without hesitation, and after a few squeamish glances at the heads that Kuryakin kindly removed for him, he follows suit. 

“You can undoubtedly survive out here for quite awhile. Why don’t you leave me?”

Kuryakin, still mother naked despite Napoleon’s offer of his shirt, shrugs a pale shoulder. “I have no interest in failing my mission in seeing you safely to America. Dancer will set them onto us soon enough, and Slate and the others know to listen to her.”

Napoleon rolls that thought around in his mind for a spell. Dancer, apparently also of the female variety, and also a selkie, will be able to locate Kuryakin by some unknown, supernatural means. And the ship is filled with sailors and officers who not only know their secrets, but are fully complicit in hiding them. 

A flush of jealousy rushes over him. He has never been so cared for as this creature before him. Nor quite as vulnerable, if Kuryakin’s comments about the Admiralty’s interest in her-- in controlling her-- is factual.

“They don’t have your pelt-- I saw your transformation after all.”

Kuryakin flicks her blue eyes to him. A small smile wells up on her lips. “Not for want of trying.”

“Ah. But they have something on you, something to keep you in check. You feel Dancer’s skin is your responsibility.”

She sighs. “No one should have to live as we do. I have every intention of getting it back to her. But I can’t do that unless they think they have me, you understand. So sit still and be rescued so I may bide my time and play my part.”

They spend the remainder of the day in pleasant silence, hiding in the shade of a palm tree and munching on the roots of a few plants Napoleon does not know the names of. One is actually sweet enough to savor, and he finds that this is not nearly the cataclysmic turn of events he had feared. He is not dead; the ship will very likely return for them; he no longer has to pretend he is a silk merchant. His eyes wander up a trail of blonde hair of their own volition, and he traces that line as it reaches across soft-looking flesh. 

Kuryakin catches his gaze, and stands up. She sweeps her hair aside and stands before him in her fullness of being, and if Napoleon were any other man he would blush. Instead he meets her gaze. 

“Yes?” He asks. 

“I will not be controlled,” she says, “by anyone.” Her voice is very careful, not too loud, and the twitch of accent he noticed earlier is thicker in her throat. “So you may admire all you wish. But never forget that the entire Admiralty could not wrest my pelt from me. You will fail much more painfully, should you try.”

“I have no designs on your pelt,” he says, and it is the truth. He has no more desire to take the sea from this woman than he has to remain upon it; they are of two different worlds, but that doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate. 

She smirks at him. “Get up. Drink that coconut. The ship is coming.”

The ship is a blur in the hazy, bright distance when Napoleon hears Slate shouting at them a few hours later. Despite the coconut, his lips are chapped, and the relief he feels upon seeing their salvation is palpable. Slate is lugging a small bag out of the small row boat he and two other men-- although now Napoleon is uncertain about anyone’s particular particulars-- have pulled to the shore, and all four of them turn their backs while Kuryakin pulls a greatcoat from the bag over her shoulders. 

He turns and looks at her, once it’s made clear he’s allowed to do so, and she levels a blistering, dangerous smile at him. “Come along, Solo,” she says, “your life at sea is not so abruptly finished as all that.” 

And so they’re rowed back to the ship, bundled up above decks in the bosun’s chair, and Solo is shepherded-- by Dancer no less-- back down to the Captain’s and his berth for endless cups of hot coffee and toast. 

“We were worried about you,” Dancer says, between plying him with coffee so hot it burns his chapped lips, and toasted hard tack to sop up the flavor. “The Captain’s a strong swimmer, of course, but that was a particularly hard blow we had.” She levels him with an inquisitive, desperate, and slightly nervous look. 

“Ah, yes. Quite the strong swimmer indeed.” He decides not to tell Dancer he knows her secret-- either of them-- and instead smiles around the rim of his cup, thanks her, and says he’ll be turning in.

That night, when the Captain returns below decks and begins to pull off her shoes and hat, Napoleon shifts in his hammock until he can see her. She is still in her vest and shirt, breeches undone at the knees. 

“Are you going to stare all night?” she asks, and begins to wash her face and hands in the small basin in the corner of the cabin. 

“No. Not all night. I’m just wondering what your plan is. In two or three weeks time we’ll reach America, and you’ll be done with me. I’ll do my duty to the Admiralty and the war effort, and you’ll return to the sea-- briefly-- before returning to the Admiralty yourself, to be continually manipulated. I just wonder...”

She doesn’t shy from him. She strides across the floor until she towers over him in his hammock despite her stature. “Do you think, in your brief time aboard, you have come up with a plan, an idea, that has not crossed my mind? I have been Captain, and held responsibility for Dancer’s freedom, for nearly ten years. I have given everything worth thinking about thought.”

“I don’t doubt it. Your keen eye is notable.”

“Yet you have a suggestion.”

He smiles up at her. “You are unrivaled on the sea and in it. That much is clear. But the Admiralty are men of the land. My sort of men.”

“You are not endearing yourself to me.”

“I cannot help what I am anymore than you can.”

Between blinks she vanishes from sight, and he sits up to find her in her own hammock, staring at him contemplatively. She looks sun hard and weathered, both tired and strong. “And you have a plan.”

“My Lady Kuryakin,” he says, and she flinches away from the title. “My Captain,” he corrects, “I always have a plan. I have a contact in America who I’m meeting to bring my... documents... to. A man named Mr. Alexander Waverly. He’s been keen on recruiting me for some time, but I haven’t had reason to change the nature of my employment. Until now. I have absolutely no doubt that he would be quite interested in yourself and your crew as well.”

“I have no interest in changing one slave master for another.” She says the words like they’re poison. 

“And I’ve no interest in giving you over like chattel. Waverly has connections within the Admiralty. He might be able to secure Dancer’s pelt. He has more connections than most men have secrets, and he’s an honest man, a thing that’s increasingly rare these days. He wants to win the war, and he has no use for slaves in doing it.”

She rolls over and all he can see of her is her back. “Why do you care of our fates, Mr. Solo?”

He feels as though struck, but holds his tongue on a sharp retort, as he understands the question despite his ire at it. “I am also a man of two worlds. I see you and Ms. Dancer and I see something of myself, despite it all.”

Kuryakin is quiet for so long Napoleon thinks she has slipped into her easy sleep. But then, a dozen breaths later, she says quietly and suredly, “And if I am interested in the morning?”

“Just say the word. When we make it into port, I’ll arrange a meeting.”

She hums once, and drops into the instantaneous sleep of a creature more comfortable atop the sea than on dry land. He stays awake for a long time after her breathing evens out, listening to it and feeling the endless and chaotic motion of the sea below them. As he slowly drifts off, all too aware of the distance between himself and the ocean-- a scant few feet of tortured planks and nails-- and wonders if he has lied to Kuryakin or not. He has only had limited dealings with Waverly, but they have been enough to convince him of the man’s political cunning as well as his general good will. He’s an interest in acquiring spies of all variety, and Napoleon doesn’t need to count himself among the genius to figure out why. The war against Bonaparte isn’t going well, and if they are to succeed, or even survive, they need to not only react to situations as they occur, but predict them, and make decisive moves before their French equivalents do. Waverly is creating his own spy army, and Napoleon thinks it’s time to join it. And if Kuryakin were to as well? Napoleon is not such a selfless man that he doesn’t find a thrill of excitement in crossing the sea back to the continent with Kuryakin at his side in the fight. 

Three days later, when Napoleon is taking a walk across the deck for some light exercise and to remind himself that the sea is not entirely his enemy-- today it is quite peaceable and there is talk among the midshipmen that they are nearing whale waters-- Kuryakin comes to stand next to him near the bow. She’s in her overcoat against the seaspray, and her hat is athwartships in the traditional manner. 

“We’ll be arriving in America in two weeks time,” she announces. Her voice no longer artificially deep, but just as sour. 

“Yes,” he says. He’s smiling, despite himself. “Slate informed me over breakfast.”

“When we get in, I would be obliged if you might have a word with your particular acquaintance on my behalf, letting him know my interest.”

He resists the urge to kiss her hand, as he has no doubt it would land him in the sea again. “My Captain, it would be my honor.”


End file.
